Catherine Carr earned her B.Sc. in Zoology from the University of Cape Town in 1977, her M.A. in Biology from State University New York at Buffalo in 1978, her Ph. D. in Neuroscience from University of California at San Diego in 1984, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at California Institute of Technology in 1987. Her research focuses on neural coding and brain evolution.

At the Marine Biological Laboratory, Dr. Carr taught in the Neural Systems and Behavior course from 1995 and was Co-Director from 2000 to 2004. From 2005 to 2008 she was the Grass Foundation Lab director, and served on the MBL Science Council from 2005 to 2011. She has taught in both SONA and IBRO courses and serves as Action Editor for the Journal of Neurophysiology and the Journal of Computational Neuroscience.

About the Masakazu Konishi Lectureship in Neural Systems and Behavior:

Dr. Masakazu “Mark” Konishi is the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He has worked extensively for three decades on the auditory systems of barn owls, which can use their acute hearing to home in on mice on the ground, even in total darkness. The research has led to an understanding of how the owl’s brain manages to “compute” precise locations in two dimensions, and how the neural pathways and circuits are involved. Dr. Konishi’s work has implications for better understanding the human brain and perhaps even for future interventions in certain neurological disorders. Dr. Konishi received a B.S. and M.S. from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Following post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Tubingen and Max-Planck-Institut in Germany, Dr. Konishi was appointed an assistant professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He subsequently held assistant and associate professor positions at Princeton University. He has been a professor at Caltech for the last 32 years. Dr. Konishi is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as numerous professional organizations. He has received many awards, including The Peter Gruber Prize in Neuroscience.